Archives for August 2011

You’ll be pleased to hear that I won’t be posting my views on the pros and cons of Payment By Results (PBR) in the social care sector. I’ll leave that for a quiet news day. Now that Cameron and Milliband have given their diagnoses – and Clegg has been acting improbably tough today – I have some belated comments of my own to make on recent events in London, Manchester and Birmingham. I will just say one thing, for those with an interest in social care. Oliver Letwin at that KPMG talk agreed that people using personal budgets are best placed to drive innovation in the sector. It is patronising to suggest that they lack mental capacity or need to be protected from their own decisions, simply because they use social care. I asked Letwin another question.

Surely the Open Public Services White Paper isn’t that radical. There is a good deal of continuity with over a decade’s worth of ‘modernisation’ under New Labour, isn’t there? He acknowledged it was in a ‘line of evolution’ with Blairite thinking on public services, and that the rhetoric bore a strong resemblance to that used by his predecessors. They too were all about promoting choice and empowering people. At least that’s what they said. But the coalition are much ‘more consistent’ and committed to ‘making it happen’ across public services. Whether you believe that or not, the fact remains that things have changed. It is not the case that the Tories have reverted to type as the headlines screamed following his speech. Far from it. The policies pursued by the coalition are remarkably similar to those pursued under the preceding New Labour governments.

And this is where I segue into the the riot of ill-informed commentary that has been doing such a bad job of getting to grips with something else that is quite new. For all the competing arguments used to explain the riots – and an opportunism from the likes of Ken Livingstone and Harriet Harman that was more than a match for the looters – it is this idea that nothing has really changed that predominates. Its the same old Tories doing the same old damage to the social fabric, they say. Which is the sort of thinking that gives trying to make sense of the rioters actions a bad name. Such a resorting to tired cliches is, after all, as pointless as the riots themselves. There is, nevertheless, an explanation to be had.

Two things can be said with some certainty. The riots of August 2011 were not a re-run of the riots of the 1980s. Though you wouldn’t think so given the censorious reaction to the usually insightful David Starkey, they had nothing to do with race this time around. Having said that, they did have something to do with the politics of multiculturalism – an ideological response to those earlier ‘race riots’ that has arguably contributed to today’s. Certainly, as Toby Young argues, moral relativism has a lot to answer for. And the second thing? The rioters weren’t reacting against state repression or police brutality, or anything else much. Quite the opposite. The impotence of the authorities – if we can still call them that – was exposed for all to see. As Mick Hume argues, the theatrical ‘fightback’ staged for the cameras, with raids on housing estates and the round-the-clock court sittings, didn’t make them look any more effectual.

So what other excuses have there been? The cuts, poverty and inequality, or a combination there-of have been cited ad nauseum. But as economic commentator Daniel Ben-Ami argues, these are long-standing features of capitalist societies, and people don’t ordinarily riot as a consequence. As for those who cite the evils of consumerism as somehow to blame, this is just an unhelpful ‘attack on aspiration’. In a similar vein, Brendan O’Neill, is irritated by those who seem to blame ‘neoliberalism’ and 80s-style greed for anything and everything, and now the riots:

… it is not Thatcher’s alleged cultivation of individualism and competition that nurtured the riots, but rather the welfare state’s decommissioning of those things, its silent war on working people’s social networks and self-respect.

Of course, there is also a problem with blaming the welfare state. Conservatives have been doing that for some time without lending any insights to the discussion. This post-war institution has, after all, been with us for 60-odd years – and has brought benefits (quite literally) as well as costs. However, as the sociologist Frank Furedi explains:

… in Britain the provision of welfare has mutated into a culture that encourages people to regard their circumstances as not a temporary phase but as a way of life. So the problem is not the provision of social benefits but the normalisation of welfare dependency as the defining feature of people’s life.

Which brings me back to where I started. The Tories have changed and not necessarily for the better. For all the talk of welfare reform and the ‘big society’, they are at least as implicated in the therapeutic-bent of today’s welfare policy as New Labour. As I discuss here. The culture of dependency was made tangible by the crisis afflicting the police, the proverbial red rag to a bull. But the crisis runs much deeper. Adult authority in general has collapsed. According to criminologist, Stuart Waiton:

From the top of society down there is a tendency to flatter, patronise and counsel the young as therapeutic, self-esteem focused techniques replace clear social and moral authority.

Dennis Hayes, co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, likens the riots to childish tantrums. Which wouldn’t have been so bad if they were stamped out rather than indulged. There were exceptions though. As Hayes argues, shopkeepers protecting their livelihoods and their neighbourhoods showed:

small signs of the possibility of a society where personal and collective responsibility begins to grow without the nanny state and its therapeutic institutions

Tessy Britton, author of Hand Made, is also encouraged by the sense of community to which the riots inadvertently gave rise:

The citizen-led clean-ups that happened across the effected areas in the days that followed the riots, lifted our spirits and gave us back a bit of hope that society hadn’t quite unravelled in the way much of the press seemed happy to promote.

And yet it would be naive to ignore the warning signs. As O’Neill makes clear, the reaction to Enfield’s vigilante ‘fascists’ puts official enthusiasm for this sort of thing in doubt. It seems that the powers-that-be are less than comfortable with community-building when the community starts building itself. But perhaps more importantly, as Furedi argues, there is a reluctance even to acknowledge the profundity of the ‘urban implosion‘ that the riots brought to the surface. And perhaps, after all, this is where the dysfunctional politics of social unrest and social care, respectively, might shed some light on the biggest problem of all. The politicians have, for some time, maintained a rhetorical commitment to putting people ‘in control’. But this is impossible while there is suspicion of the exercise of authority. Without it we are unable to truly take control of our lives and of the communities in which we live. Whether its a feeble culture of policing, or social worker aversion to ‘vulnerable’ adults making decisions about their own care – its time we put failing adult authority in the dock.

In her foreword to The Big Society Challenge, published by the Keystone Development Trust, Elizabeth Truss MP exhibits the opportunism that gives the Big Society a bad name. For her it’s a way out of crises – whether its MPs expenses or bankers bonuses – and a way to pass the buck. ‘It is no longer assumed that experts and politicians can make technically correct decisions’ she says with not inconsiderable understatement. Still, the notion that the state should play an ever greater role in our lives needs to be challenged. This view – which has intensified under the coalition with its Nudge agenda – is built on a diminished sense of people’s capacities to make their own decisions and run their own lives.

While I wouldn’t doubt the paternalism of Big State, the paternity of the Big Society is much disputed. According to editor Marina Stott, within Conservative Party ranks at least, it began with a Policy Green Paper in 2009, and a Hugo Young Memorial Lecture later that year. Cameron talked about ‘social renewal’ and a new ‘agitating’ role for the state. Early last year, the Big Society’s constituent parts – public service reform, community empowerment and ‘mass engagement and philanthropy’ – were revealed. But it wasn’t until last year’s (not to be confused with this year’s) re-launch that he tried to define it. ‘You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the Big Society’, he said.

Call it what you like, there is a growing disconnect between the vague rhetoric hinting at the possibility of an independent citizenry running its own affairs, and the announcement of some very top-down policy-making. So we have a National Citizen Service for 16 year olds, 5,000 community organisers, community-friendly ‘civic servants’, and a Big Society Bank. On top of that we now have a Minister for Civil Society charged with stimulating ‘social action’, and a Minister for Decentralisation to make sure there is no over-officious meddling. (All we need now is a Ministry for Silly Walks and the project will be beyond parody.) As Ben McCall, one of the book’s contributors, says, it is ‘all top-down and national, for a rhetorically bottom-up and localist agenda’. Far from heralding the liberating cultural shift envisaged, the Big Society has prompted a wave of initiatives from a political elite that couldn’t be further removed from the society people actually live in.

The more you look into it the more apparent it becomes that this ‘big idea’ is nothing of the sort, and in every other way is precisely the opposite of what it purports to be. For all its radical pretensions, says Mark J Smith of the Open University, the Big Society has much in common with the pessimism about human nature that characterises traditional conservative thought. And for all the wide-eyed talk, there is an underlying hostility to truly transformative change, and deliberate substantive interventions in wider society. Nevertheless – to my surprise, not to mention my disappointment – by the time I got to Smith’s second chapter on ‘Environmental Responsibility and the Big Society’, it became apparent that this was intended as a recommendation not a criticism.

Anne Power, at the London School of Economics, explains how the civil rights movement inspired community initiatives in the late 1960s, and how by the mid-1970s this ‘very short initial phase’ of self-sufficiency gave way to the state-led grants that are so threatened today. Then she too, having made an important point about the ‘hand-holding’ that was to follow, takes refuge in the localist ethos and an evident distaste for ‘gigantesque interventions’. In keeping with this outlook that second chapter of Smith’s goes on to argue that ‘we are now more willing to embrace’ obligations, duties and responsibilities that we might previously have shunned. People ‘recycle household waste, maintain a healthy lifestyle and avoid behaviour that is harmful or annoying for their neighbours’.

Is this petty moralism, so typical of environmental thinking, really what the Big Society is all about? If social entrepreneur Robert Ashton, with his triple-bottom-line, pro-fair trade, conservative anti-capitalism is anything to go by, then yes it is. We ‘need to make do with what we have’ he declares, after all ‘less material wealth can often deliver greater spiritual contentment’. Tim RT Jones, of social investment firm Allia IPS, echoes this contemporary prejudice. Making money is bad. GDP is a poor measure of our well-being. Etc etc. Far from this oft-repeated view being interrogated, it is taken as given throughout the Big Society Challenge. In the final chapter, Jess Steele, of Development Trusts Association declares that it is not ‘power-over’ that we need but ‘power-to’. The important thing isn’t to seize control but ‘for groups of local people to be allowed to make our own change, using whatever resources we can collectively marshal’.

Putting aside the fact that this ‘power-to’, make-do-and-mend, money is the root of all evil mentality doesn’t get us very far, the notion of people being more involved and having more say over things still appeals. Nevertheless, notes one contributor, Colin Wiles, there is a ‘certain paradox in central government telling people to take control of their own lives’. Chanan and Miller, of consultancy PACES empowerment, think we need ‘super’ community organisers, professional paid-up members of the Big Society to coordinate things. Other contributors, thankfully, seem to have more faith in us to get on with it ourselves. Steve Wyler, of Development Trusts Association, calls for a ‘debate about the capability and potential for ordinary people’ to run their communities. Yet even he thinks that it is government that should ‘create conditions for independent civil society to flourish’.

Then there are Neil Stott and Noel Longhurst of Keystone Development Trust and University of East Anglia, respectively. They also note ‘a degree of irony about the central state attempting to impose a big idea about how local communities should behave and organise themselves onto local communities’. But what is doubly ironic is their own argument that ‘poor places are fragile, fraught and fearful’, and that the poor don’t have the resources to ‘organise themselves’ or build their own ‘community infrastructure’. This is the same diminished notion of people’s capacities that justifies such top-down impositions in the first place. David Wood and Sylvia Brown of Rural Action East and Action with Communities in Rural England, repeat an all too familiar refrain. It ‘will not occur spontaneously’ they warn, not without people getting ‘ongoing support and help to develop their own capacity’.

But the supposed dependency of the general public is nothing compared with that of the ‘independent’ sector itself. Social enterprise, for instance, the sexy new kid on the voluntary sector block, is still ‘regarded as woolly, confused, small-scale and grant dependent’ says Andy Brady of Anglia Ruskin University. Ashton is right when he says that social entrepeneurs tend to ‘survive only with subsidy and support’ and are not necessarily the beacons for the Big Society that they are made out to be. Reportedly 40% of them receive half their funding from state sources. These self-appointed ‘civil society’ leaders so critical of the ‘year zero’ of the Big Society advocates, nevertheless seek the continued patronage of the state.

All of which means, for those of us who initially held out some hope for it, that the Big Society has little to offer. As far as getting to grips with some of the problems associated with it, The Big Society Challenge is a good introduction, if a somewhat mixed bag. There are insights to be had, if not necessarily the ones that your supposed to take away. I can’t help but conclude, for instance, that advocates and critics of the Big Society seem united in their underlying hostility to people’s autonomy and their ability to exercise it without ‘support’. Far from representing a challenge to Big State, the Big Society is providing a new rationale for institution-building and state-led activity in the community. And far from offering opportunities for the enterprising, it appeals to elite prejudices about people’s incapacities and about the way we live our lives. After the briefest and most casual of flings, I can only conclude that we’re best off without it.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.